RE-ACT: Social REpresentations of Community Multimedia Centres and ACTion for ImprovementSara Vannini

Telecentres should fulfil the communication and information needs of the communities where they are located.

Some research states that sometimes telecentres do not work, but there’s increasing evidence that the reason might be of a cultural or social nature, thus not directly related with the telecentre and the technology it provides, but its usage, the context.

Social representation: social psychological phenomena can only be understood if they are seen as being embedded in the socio-cultural context. The function of a social representation is to establish how people interpret their world, and to enable people to communicate with the other members of the community.

Actions for improvement:

The use of mobile phones as an instrument of empowerment.

The use of ICTs to develop cultural content that reflect the nature and the vision of local communities.

Make this content available for visitors, offering chances for cultural exchange and understanding.

Citizens’ Understanding and Definitions of Democracy during Internet CampaignsAmara Thiha

Authoritarian states usually moraliza and define democracy in their own particular way. Why moralized? Intentions to practice and implement democracy collide with some interpretations of the third way of democratization / of liberal democracy. How do authoritarian states take up the web 2.0 and politics 2.0?

The research consists on the comparison of three authoritarian states: Myanmar (dictatorship), Iran (multy-party authoritarian state) and China (single party authoritarian state). A case is developed analysing the political blogosphere.

Web crawling analysis provided data to perform both quantitative and qualitative analysis. Ethnography also provided a good qualitative insight.

Discussion

Matti Tedre: is the blogging community representative of the whole population?

Mazhar Ali: how do you define an authoritarian regime? A: there are objective/established definitions that take into account the number of parties, the political freedom and citizen rights, etc.

Vanessa FrÃ­as: how are data extracted? A: some blogs are read, all of them are treated with text analysis tools. Vanessa FrÃ­as: natural language processing is a methodology.

Ismael PeÃ±a-LÃ³pez: did you include in your sample pro-government (i.e. hired by the government) bloggers? A: yes, definitely.

But online activity is clearly low. Why is it so? Difficulties of physical access, design of the website, attempted migrations to Facebook, language issues, lack of digital skills, lack of interest and/or time, organizations and individuals up skill, philosophical issues…

And nevertheless people keep saying that the site is interesting/important.

One of the reasons is that projecthonduras.com has three layers: the website, the network and the community. The last one, enhanced by the former two, is invisible, private and unmediated, so difficult to measure but where outcome happens. This layer will be the target of this research.

Discussion

Ugo Vallauri: has the analysis been done online or offline? A: both of them.

Ismael PeÃ±a-LÃ³pez: could it be that — like Pippa Norris or Howard Rheinghold say — that people gather around actions and not principles/projects, and that would explain the short term relationsihps or the online diaspora? A: what is really happening is that people neither gather around principles/projects nor actions: they just get in touch personally, offline, at the “invisible” level to get things done. They do not bother going online or going “visible” unless their needs require asking for collective wisdom.

Fifth Annual ICT4D Postgraduate Symposium (2010)

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